Synopsis
On a trip across Western Europe to promote her newest release, filmmaker Anna encounters several individuals—familiar and otherwise—and attends to their discontents.
The Meetings of Anna
1978 ‘Les Rendez-vous d'Anna’ Directed by Chantal Akerman
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Alternative Title
De Afspraken van Anna
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It's been about an hour since the final voice message played and this film closed and I sit here absolutely floored by the power of Chantal Akerman's cinema. Her work specifically in the 70s has become something of great importance to me personally. Her films in this period are formally rigorous, pushing the form into areas that I'm not sure had been approached yet and it's a shame that nobody remembers her for anything other than Jeanne Dielman.
Les Rendez-vous d’Anna is a deeply personal kind of autobiographical tale. Anna moves through cities showing her films having short encounters with strangers, friends and family and each scene is filled with a kind of unknowing sadness that seeps through. Anna is…
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i feel so seen and unseen.
with such long, stationary takes, akerman (as she did so masterfully in jeanne dielman) invites you to step into the frame. there are so many quiet moments but never a dull one. it’ll be hard to shake that forlorn feeling by the end.
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In New Orleans, everything is demarcated temporally as "before the storm" or "after the storm." The entire world is shaped and colored by Hurricane Katrina and the federal floods, and it comes up in unexpected ways, from casual references used to indicate when something happened to significant, simple explanations for why something is the way it is now. It's always there. In The Meetings of Anna, the watershed moment that seems to haunt all of the characters is apparently WWII.
It's there haunting everyone Anna meets, directly or indirectly, from lost loved ones to the economic results of the war. It has, over the 30 years between the end of it and the time of this film, altered countless lives,…
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“you say you’re happy and i believe you. you look happy.”
hearing someone that has known anna her whole life tell her she looks happy just proves how little others are able to understand her. or how little they tune into her, while looking at her to provide something for them. she is detached from almost everyone she interacts with, and yet they perceive her as an open, empathetic being to unload their thoughts onto.
at times, it was hard to watch something that felt like looking in a mirror. it’s rare to find a connection where there’s a balance between what you give and receive back from someone. it’s so easy to feel close to someone because they know…
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"I miss you. I have no one to talk to."
"But you never talked to me."Feelings of loneliness and isolation radiate through every frame, yet there's just enough tenderness to keep me going. People are drawn to Anna, and they want to tell her everything, but to know someone's secrets is not the same as being close to them. To watch Anna through Akerman's static camera as she tries to find a real love in these lonely cities is richly engaging. It's a slow movie -- I would be lying if I said parts of it didn't bore me. However, in the case of films like this, where the narrative takes a back seat to character and atmosphere, I…
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Anna is a receptacle into which other people pour their loneliness and regret. At times, it's hard not to see her as a victim, a woman who stands still long enough for men she doesn't know to tell her about their emotional pain; their rootlessness; their fears for both themselves and their nations. Anna listens, but perhaps it's because she's been conditioned to do so. We see this with Ida, a family friend, with whom Anna sits, silently, listening to a litany of long-hidden suffering; Anna slides closer to her, physically offering comfort the way she learned to do from her mother; the way she does for her on-again, off-again lover Daniel.
Anna is a survivor of the emotions of…
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Chantal Akerman almost exclusively works on horizontal planes of space. Her compositions are known for their flat, minimalist staging, and she usually cuts with perpendicular angles to emphasize each shot's flatness. So one of the many surprising shots in Les Rendez-Vous d'Anna comes early. Anna leaves her hotel in Germany, and the camera tracks alongside her in a horizontal dolly. Suddenly, a flash of vertical motion interrupts the frame. It's a female maid, almost nonchalantly in the background, waving a sheet as she makes the bed. Another few moments later, another maid appears in the depth of the frame, also working. Akerman then cuts to a perpendicular frame, as Anna continues to walk down the hallway, and three more maids…
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I’m listening, I am.
Sometimes when I’m talking to someone I feel a distance that I’ve never been able to accurately describe. It’s odd, because I can hear them and comprehend what they’re saying, even carry on a discussion without it being apparent, but this feeling of detachment from the conversation is persistent. When I was younger, I was often one of those insufferable people who just waited their turn to talk, not really listening to what the other person was saying, and I’ve worked hard to rid myself of that bad habit, but now a new issue has arisen. It doesn’t happen all the time; this almost-dissociative disconnect is usually something that affects me when I am either speaking with…
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When a life is either absorbed by earthly occupations and business (carried with passion or without it) or it is (un)willingly handled without balance, our acquaintances and experiences become little fragments. It is our decision, although not entirely under our control, to transform these little fragments into a big puzzle called life. This puzzle, as big or small as it may be, can be dark, light, round, squared or even shapeless. However, if one of these hundreds or thousands of pieces are forgotten, an inner void slowly starts to grow. The bigger the amount of missing pieces, the bigger the void. The more we let time fly without them, it is harder to put them back on coherently. Alienation is a complex theme.
99/100
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Top 100 Directors Challenge: 72. Chantal Akerman
In Les rendez-vous d'Anna, director Chantal Akerman takes her audience on a trip around some of Europe's grandest cities with the emotionally distant Anna, as she seeks to promote her latest movie.
The journey is long and broken up into a number of discreet encounters, in which Anna's history of detachment is gradually exposed. A lost soul clearly at odds with the world around her, she connects, she disconnects, she moves on sometimes leaving deep scars behind her.
Often filmed with a static front-facing camera, Akerman's detailed, penetrative discussions help us to fall deep inside the mind of the characters, with this insightful approach being balanced by some distance-affirming long tracking shots. Reminiscent of many films before and after it, this wreaks of the Akerman style of character inspection illustrated best in Jeanne Dielman. Slowly engage, gradually reveal, sharply remind.
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